International Summer School ‘Digitization and its Impact on Society’Technische Universität DresdenSeptember 29 - October 5, 2013

The digital revolution is altering the present in many ways not all of which have been sufficiently addressed by research.

There are three core aspects to this change:

1. The digitization of our world: More and more information is being converted into a digital format or is already being produced in this numerical form. Parallel to the emergence of ‘Big Data’, digitization allows2. data from different sources to be combined and analyzed together: The representation of different types of information in a numerical model enables the analysis and combination of this information through the use of algorithms. This, in turn, is the basis for3. the growing emancipation of data from the purpose for which they were produced: Digitization allows any kind of query to the data possible in a mathematical model. The result is the user’s freedom from the archive’s structures, coupled with a certain loss of control over one’s own data.

Initiated by the traditional computer-based sciences, the process of digitization also affects Social Sciences and the Humanities. Although each discipline has already developed its own questions and approaches in Digital Humanities, a broader, interdisciplinary discussion about the new technologies’ impact on society is still missing.

The summer school’s aim is to initiate this interdisciplinary discussion.